A Porter Airlines flight was recently cancelled after a child was standing in their seat and refused to secure their seatbelt.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
We lack a word in the English language for the emotion that floods the body of a parent who is the custodian of a screaming child on an airplane. It is some combination of humiliation, helplessness and a palpable sense of being judged. Your brain considers all sorts of scenarios in that moment: Can I order a rye for the baby? How long will it take me to die if I jump out the window? Maybe I’m already dying? Surely death would be less painful.
Whatever that emotion is called, surely no one has experienced it more profoundly than the parent of the toddler who made international news this week for delaying a Porter Airlines flight past the point it could take off from Victoria’s airport. The plane, which was originally scheduled to depart last Thursday at 10:30 p.m., was unable to take off before the runway closed at 12:30 a.m., leaving passengers stranded until the next day.
The precise details of exactly what happened are limited, ostensibly to protect the privacy of those involved. As such, it has not been publicly reported whether the parent was a mother or father, whether the toddler was a boy or a girl, and we do not know the extent to which the parent contemplated his or her own death at that moment (though surely they did). What we do know, according to a statement from Porter, is this: “A young child was standing in their seat and would not secure their seat belt. The aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition, so the crew elected to return to the terminal and have the passengers disembark.”
There are all sorts of judgments one can make from the outside looking in: You should never take a toddler on a red-eye (but sometimes, there are no other options); the parent should have come prepared with toys and snacks (but a toddler in a meltdown is impervious to all outside forces); Porter should have kicked the family off the flight earlier (fair, but presumably flight attendants wanted to appear compassionate); and the parent should have performed a pretzel manoeuvre, folding the child into his or her seat and holding the toddler down for takeoff.
Porter flight from Victoria to Toronto cancelled after child refuses to wear seatbelt
That last suggestion is the most obvious one, and the reason why – one can assume – we don’t hear about these sorts of things happening more often. That is: When confronted with a non-co-operative chaos goblin on a plane, parents usually resort to brute force to get that seatbelt on. And indeed, had the incident occurred during landing, and not takeoff, there would have been no choice: The parent would have had to hold the child down for his or her safety.
I can empathize with the parent in this situation, however, because of how far the pendulum has swung against using physical force – any type of physical force – against a child, especially in public (and usually rightly so). The vast majority of Baby Boomers report being spanked as kids; they were told to stop crying, or they’d be given something to cry about. Contrast that with modern parenting philosophies centred around bodily autonomy (Australian sexuality educator Deanne Carson even advised parents to ask for consent when changing a baby’s diaper) and “respectful” or even “permissive” parenting, where children are given the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies. In schools, teachers are explicitly discouraged from making any physical contact with students. In health care, children are increasingly asked to assent to treatment.
There are good reasons driving this social shift toward bodily autonomy for children, and almost all of them make exceptions for situations where a child’s welfare is concerned (even the most “respectful” parent will wrangle a kid into a car seat or force a helmet on his head for a bike ride). But the unintended effect is a climate of hypersurveillance of physical interactions between adults and kids, which is made worse by a culture where parents are constantly judging each other, and feeling judged.
Surely few would have faulted that Porter parent for folding the child at the waist and using a linebacker manoeuvre to keep him or her in place. God made toddlers smaller than adults for this very reason. But it’s also not hard to see why this parent – any parent – would be wary of using physical force on their child, even in a situation that most would view as merited, with dozens of pairs of eyes (and cellphone cameras) all around. We live, we learn, we contemplate jumping out of an airplane to our untimely deaths. Ultimately, we do the best we can, and then drown our sorrows in rye alone, just until the baby becomes old enough to partake.